The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (99 page)

Libya (1923–31):
Muammar Gaddafi has claimed that 750,000 Libyans—half of the total population of Libya—were killed under Italian occupation. Scholars more commonly estimate the death toll at half the
Bedouin
population, or around 100,000.
²⁵

Cigarettes:
I get occasional suggestions that I should include tobacco company executives among history’s worst killers, but smoking lacks two critical characteristics that my top one hundred share—immediacy and coercion. A voluntary activity that might kill you thirty years down the road just isn’t in the same league as getting shot, beheaded, or gassed.

Colombia (the civil war known as La Violencia: 1946–58):
I found two authorities claiming that 300,000 died, as opposed to five authorities claiming that 200,000 died. This means the death toll is probably below my threshold.

Arab-Israeli Wars (since 1947):
These are the most heavily publicized conflicts of the past half century, and many readers will expect to see them here; however, Israel is a small country and there just aren’t enough people in this part of the world to generate death tolls at my threshold without a special effort. Estimates run from 50,000 to 100,000 deaths in total.

Tibet (ongoing since 1959):
Most of the killing inflicted on Tibet is part of Mao’s legacy. I include it in that chapter.

Abortion:
Judging by the emails I’ve received over the years, this will be the most controversial absence. Let’s keep it civil and note that “breathing individual” is part of my definition, which excludes the unborn.

East Timor (conquest by Indonesia: after 1975):
Of the eleven estimates I found, only one put it unequivocally at my threshold of 300,000. One estimated 200,000 to 300,000, and all the rest don’t come close. The median of all eleven is 200,000.

AIDS (after 1981):
I am sometimes told that Ronald Reagan (or someone else) deserves condemnation as a mass murderer for allowing AIDS to get out of hand; however, no matter how badly governments bungled the response to the first appearance of AIDS, it was simply beyond anyone’s control.

Starving Children in Africa:
To be on my list there has to be a core of violence and coercion in which identifiable perpetrators kill, beat, or plunder identifiable victims. Otherwise, it’s economics, not atrocitology.

Liberia (1989–2003):
Another damn African civil war. You’ll sometimes see estimates that reach my threshold, but the official death toll as reported by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Committee is 250,000 dead.

Burundi (1993–2004):
Yet another civil war between Hutu and Tutsi. I found fifteen articles with estimates of the dead ranging from 200,000 to 500,000. The median of these is indeed at my threshold of 300,000, but the most authoritative single number is 260,000 dead, as calculated in 2004 by the UN Population Fund.
²⁶

Iraq War (ongoing since 2003):
Since this is the most controversial war of the twenty-first century (so far), many readers will want to see it on my list. A widely publicized report in
Lancet
in October 2006 estimated that 655,000 Iraqis had died violently in the war; however, I’m more convinced by several other studies (such as one by the World Health Organization) that estimated around 150,000 deaths.
²⁷

Disputing Number 1

I have to admit a bias. It is pretty hard to shake my belief that the Second World War was the most destructive man-made event in history. Other candidates for the top rank have been suggested over the years—Stalin, slavery, the conquest of America, Mao—and these are all found somewhere in this book, but the horrors of World War II are so complex and well documented that I find it difficult to accept any of the other contenders without extremely good evidence.

With World War II, we have every nation on the planet, many under the rule of brutal tyrants and ideologies, pounding away at each other, back and forth across three continents, with massively destructive weapons such as atomic bombs. Compare that with what occurred in China under Mao. Yes, he was a ruthless dictator in the largest nation on the planet for a quarter century. He certainly had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit mass murder on a grand scale, but he was only one man in one country. Just at the gut level, I would suspect that an all-out war between Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, and Mao would kill a lot more people than Mao could do all by himself.

It’s not just at the grand scale. The horrors of World War II are fractal—they are just as jagged up close as they are from a distance. The massacre at Babi Yar, the bombing of Dresden, and the Battle of the Bulge each killed thirty-some thousand people, and each is important enough by itself to have been the subject of individual books, yet these are not even the worst that World War II has to offer. The war produced deadlier massacres, air raids, and battles. Compared to World War II, what occurred under Mao (for example) seems smoother under the microscope, with fewer deadly events to describe. Even with a big famine, several purges, and a couple of wars, the timeline of Mao’s rule just doesn’t have the same density as World War II. While writing the chapter on World War II, I worked hard to trim a complicated narrative down to the basics, but with Mao, I worked hard to find enough details to fill out the chapter.

Overlap

One big difference between ranking atrocities and ranking people is that people are very clearly defined. If I drew up a list of the one hundred most important people in history, I wouldn’t find that Hitler and Stalin share a leg, and that Napoleon was actually five people taking turns, and that Martin Luther was a centaur. With atrocities, on the other hand, I have to decide whether the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars should count as one, two, or seven events, and whether the Armenian Genocide is its own atrocity or part of World War I. This means that another list-maker using my exact same numbers could easily reshuffle the list just by dividing some atrocities and combining others.

I have a few rules of thumb for dealing with the problem:

If the overlap between two episodes is slight, then I treat them as separate. Mao and the Korean War appear in each other’s chapters, but only briefly.

If an event is entirely contained within another event on this list, the smaller event doesn’t get its own chapter. For example, I treat the Holocaust as part of World War II, not as a separate event. After all, if I were to give the Holocaust its own chapter, then why stop there? Seventeen pieces of World War II have death tolls large enough to stand alone among the one hundred deadliest events in history: five battles, five theaters of operation, and seven campaigns against noncombatants. If I went around breaking every large event into its component parts, one out of every six chapters would be some aspect of World War II.

Between those obvious guidelines is a mushy middle ground: Should I bundle closely related multicides together, or treat them separately? The Napoleonic Wars and the Haitian Slave Revolt came from the French Revolution, but they definitely went in different directions. On the other hand, the two civil wars in the Sudan could earn separate chapters by body count, but I can’t describe them separately because each one is incomplete without the other.

In general, I count tyrants (Saddam Hussein, Peter the Great) separate from their wars (Iran-Iraq War, Great Northern War) unless that war is the setting for almost all of their killing. (Hitler and World War II, Lopez and the Triple Alliance).

I’m more likely to combine old events and split apart recent ones. You probably don’t need to know each individual conflict in the fall of the Roman or Ming empires in excruciating detail, so one chapter covering the overall event is enough. Similarly, a hundred years from now, the whole upheaval in Indochina from 1945 into the 1980s will probably be considered a single event, but for now, I treat all of the bits and pieces of recent Vietnamese history separately in order to give you more detail of an era that still affects us today.

I’m often guided by the complaints I hear in debates on comparative genocide. When people complain about the treatment of the American Indian, they mean the whole thing, from Columbus to Wounded Knee. When they ask how many Indians died, they want the grand total, not each little piece. On the other hand, the complaints about Saddam Hussein’s tyranny are usually quite different from the complaints about the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, so I treat those separately.

APPENDIX 2:
THE HEMOCLYSM

Death toll:
150 million

Rank:
the other Number 1

Type:
technological and political upheaval

Broad dividing line:
Us vs. Them

Time frame:
early twentieth century

Location:
earth

Major participants:
humankind

Who usually gets the most blame:
people, technology, economics

The reason this isn’t the actual Number 1 on my list:
Because it combines several distinct events. If I were to include this as a fully accredited event, I’d have to drop a fourth of my chapters (Stalin, World War I, and so on) and replace them with more dynastic upheavals from medieval China. Nobody wants that.

W
HEN PEOPLE SAY THAT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IS THE BLOODIEST CENTURY
on record, they’re really referring to the string of interconnected barbarities that stretched from the First World War to the deaths of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Although each of these wars and dictators represents a distinct event, many are closely interrelated. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were not only tyrants in their own right, but also major players in World War II, which was clearly a sequel to World War I. The Russian Civil War, which paved the way for the rise of Stalin, was also a spin-off of World War I. The anarchy that swept China following the overthrow of the monarchy brought Chiang Kai-shek to power, put Mao in conflict with him, and encouraged the Japanese invasion. The fall of the Japanese Empire following World War II left Korea up for grabs, and Mao’s army was among those who tried to grab it.

It’s very possible, therefore, that future historians will consider these events to be mere episodes of a single massive upheaval—the “Hemoclysm,” to give it a name (Greek for “blood flood”)—which took the lives of some 150 million people. All in all, over 80 percent of violent deaths in the twentieth century occurred in the Hemoclysm.

Geopolitically, the Hemoclysm arose from the decline of two old empires and divides neatly into two parts—Eastern and Western. The Western Hemoclysm began when the decline of the Ottomans left a congestion of petty states in the Balkans under the competing influence of Russia and Austria-Hungary. A war between them quickly expanded to include all of the world’s powers. This war was so destructive of armies and wealth that four of Europe’s most important monarchies collapsed. The resulting power vacuum was filled by the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia. These two competing ideologies consolidated power brutally, and then fought each other in the Second World War, which was basically a rerun of the First World War. The death of Stalin in 1953 finally extinguished the Western Hemoclysm after the loss of some 100 million lives.

The Eastern Hemoclysm began when the fall of the Chinese emperor spawned four decades of civil war that attracted the ambitions of the Japanese. In 1949, the bloodbath of the interregnum gave way to a greater bloodbath as the Communists consolidated power under Mao, who died in 1976. When seen as a continuum, this phase of Chinese history was a sixty-five-year nightmare which took some 55 million lives.

If it weren’t for the fact that the Second World War is considered to be a single event, we could probably consider the Eastern and Western halves of the Hemoclysm to be distinctly unrelated pieces of history.

Why did the world suddenly explode into this unprecedented wave of killing? The causes are complex, but after years of study, I think I’ve narrowed it down to three reasons:

1. Because they could.

2. Because they wanted to.

3. And because everybody else was doing it.

Or, if you’d prefer fancier academic terms for these causes, let’s say:

1. Technology.

2. Ideology.

3. The escalating cycle of violence.

Because They Could (Technology)

It wasn’t just machine guns scything down advancing infantry by the fistful. It wasn’t just airplanes delivering death hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. It was trucks and railroads that could provision huge armies in desolate battle zones. Tanks brought movement back to armies that had stalled in front of unbreakable fortifications. Radar and sonar could locate enemies far beyond the line of sight. Radio could coordinate offensives across an entire continent. Industry produced vast quantities of munitions that could be expended in wasteful overkill. Urbanization brought huge populations together where they could be pounded by air raids or rounded up for massacre or deportation. Well-staffed and well-wired bureaucracies made it nearly impossible to hide from the tax collector, the draft board, or the secret police.

Because They Wanted To (Ideology)

One might hope to be clever and connect the major upheavals of the twentieth century ideologically:

Nationalism (World War I) + Socialism (Stalin) = something even worse: National Socialism (Hitler).

Unfortunately, this analysis fails on two points. First, National Socialism was no more “socialist” than the Democratic Republic of (North) Korea is a “democratic republic.” The Nazis called themselves “socialists” because it attracted more working-class support than calling themselves the “We’ll Stomp Anyone Who Gets in Our Way Party,” but they hated real socialists and supported none of the economic redistribution that is the core of authentic socialism.

Second, we can’t blame the First World War entirely on nationalism. In fact, it’s hard to blame the First World War on anything in particular because we’re still not sure what it was all about. However, the Great War was such a catastrophic trauma for Western Civilization that it caused a massive ideological reassessment across Europe. Among the winning countries, this showed up as postwar hedonism and artistic nihilism, but among the losing countries, the rejection of mainstream philosophy was more thorough. Russia turned left, toward the hyper-modernism of Marxism, while Germany turned right, toward the hyper-primitive Nazism. Both philosophies brutally dehumanized and demonized the opposition, and casually threw away the lives of their followers in the name of a greater good.

Because Everyone Else Was Doing It
(The Escalating Cycle of Violence)

Each killing created a litter of bitter orphans who would grow up to avenge their father’s death. Each campaign pushed thousands of refugees into a life of scavenging and plundering. Each draft put more weapons into the hands of thousands of angry, alienated young men who were just as likely to use them against their own government as against the enemy. Every conquered nation had to be liberated. Every surprise attack brought another country into the war. Every loss had to be reversed. No victory was ever final.

It was only after the development of nuclear weapons and the prospect of the end of the world that the cycle of violence ran into a brick wall and was forced to stop.